All it took was one $3 billion deal for Google to reveal what the company is really about.

There are moments that define companies, that go beyond the meaningless platitudes penned by the marketers and, for better or worse, reveal the very nucleic acids of ethos flowing through the water coolers and holding the cubicles together.

advertisement

Google has sold Motorola Mobility for a mere $2.91 billion (after buying it for $12.5 billion in 2011). And in selling off its last and only chance to build incredible mobile hardware in-house, the company has stated what it isn’t. Google is not Apple. They are not hunting for the next Jony Ive who will tantalize you with the next aluminum or the next glass. They will not make the next must-have phone, tablet, or wearable.

Google is not the next simplicity.

Google is not your cute product company, your sexy product company, or your mom’s product company. Google does not care about trends, even if it knows what’s trending.

What we’ve been calling search, and Gmail, and Adwords, and G+, and artificial intelligence, and home automation, and headsets, and privacy, and Android OS, and open architecture, and mantras like “don’t be evil”–it’s all just infrastructure in an age when our electricity is just another word for information.

Google does not want Motorola Mobility–even though with $50 billion in cash, Google can obviously afford to keep it–because Google is only interested in industrial design as a tool to expand the reach of their digital infrastructure (see: Nest and Glass). Google views phones as not just a solved design problem, but a nuisance in a world in which objects will become obsolete, in which humans will eventually connect to one another through only one ethereal conduit: Google.

UPDATE: Did our passionate rant speak too soon?

Tony Fadell, who is best known as the father of the iPod and founding Nest, is apparently taking control of Google’s hardware with the rest of the Nest team.

The even bigger twist, though, is that Google negotiated to retain Motorola’s highly secretive Advanced Technology and Products (ATAP) division that brought us the technology in the Moto X, which is led by Regina Dugan, the former head of DARPA. That group also just hired, and will retain, one of our favorite UX designers in the world, Ivan Poupyrev. ATAP will be repositioned to work more closely with the Android team.

advertisement

Even still, much of our thesis here stands. Is ATAP an industrial design firm? Not as you know it. From what we can tell, they’re more a tech and UX firm after swinging-for-the-fences interactions like electronic pills and tattoos that could form as a serve of communication. Indeed, they may be inventing Google’s ethereal conduit as we speak.

About the author

Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day.